Robotic Process Automation: The Engine Behind Digital Transformation

Published on 21 November 2018

The internet has ushered in a tremendous transformation to how businesses operate today. Every industry has been swept away by the overwhelming and sweeping force of digitisation. There are no more debates about whether businesses should embark on digital transformation projects, but just a strong realisation of how critical digital transformation is to their very survival in this brave new world.

Digital transformation projects, on their own, have the potential to often grow into gigantic white elephants when they are not approached with a clear focus. Digital transformation brings substantial cost savings, contributes to revenue growth, and even improve profit margins. However, the fact that cutting-edge technology tends to be expensive in general makes the top management averse to such transformation exercises.

Robotic Process Automation: An Introduction

RPA is the use of software robots to interpret and automate work processes. These robots have the cognitive capabilities to interpret and understand the context of the work processes and automate the repetitive tasks in the organisations.

The idea that software robots could be used to automate business processes sounds quite futuristic. It is not. This technology is here, right now!

All organisations deal with mountains of repetitive work daily. The vast number of repetitive, low-level tasks that professionals perform in all the departments from HR to marketing to sales to admin bring down their productivity substantially. Robotic Process Automation automates these tasks with rules-based decision-making. This can have a multitude of positive implications for the businesses. Firstly, their resources are now free to invest their time on more mission-critical tasks that create value for the organisation. With the reduction in workloads, the organisations can be leaner and more agile. Secondly, the removal of human intervention reduces the scope for errors in business processes, thereby contributing to unlocking more efficiencies.

RPA: Growth Engine of Digital Transformation?

Business leaders are always looking for ways to leverage digital technology to improve their business processes and achieve higher growth. It is vital that they understand how to prioritise various digital initiatives so that they can achieve maximum growth with smart digitisation. For this to happen, they must be able to differentiate between digitisation and digital transformation.

Digitisation is the use of digital technology to improve the way businesses operate.

Digital transformation, on the other hand, is the use of digital technology to create value.

It is the latter where Robotic Process Automation offers the most potential. With the help of this technology, businesses are not only able to achieve their digital transformation journeys faster, but also take benefit from it sooner, thereby justifying the transformation exercise in the first place. For this reason, RPA is courting more and more attention from IT heads who are looking to demonstrate to other CXOs the tangible value addition of their digital transformation efforts to their organisation. Some real-world cases can help them make their case:

The ANZ Experience

One of the most definitive use cases in favour of RPA come from Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, more popularly known as ANZ. The organisation has deployed hundreds of RPA robots from Automation Anywhere across their organisation and have plans to take that number to more than 1000. They have witnessed impressive results from the initiative. Pankajam Sridevi, Managing Director of ANZ Bengaluru Hub, states that 40% improvement in the efficiencies has become the norm after the implementation of these robots. More importantly, they witness other more important benefits like a substantial reduction in end-to-end customer delivery time.

Today, ANZ has deployed RPA robots across a vast array of their business processes, including funds disbursements, tracing funds, transaction investigations, and so on. They even deployed robots to their auditing process, which is a complex process of a whole another magnitude. They have tasted success there too, although it took them a long time to smoothen out the wrinkles there.

This shows that RPA has the potential to automate even the most complex and high-context business processes.

The Core Digital Experience

Another success story coming out of the application of RPA is the LA-based Core Digital Media. Core Digital extracts information from 50 different online publishers worldwide. Previously, it used to be a manual exercise, which meant that dedicated resources would spend roughly 6 hours a day extracting information from various sources, including emails, websites, and FTPs. Recently, they deployed RPA robots from Automation Anywhere and experienced a shot in their productivity.

Since the deployment, Core Digital saves more than 300 hours monthly amounting to $150,000 per year. However, that is just one dimension of the benefits offered by the RPA. Sujay Kar,

Director of Business Intelligence at Core Digital Media, says that they were able now to divert their attention to more value-adding tasks like improving client revenues. In one case, they were able to launch 3000 additional ads for one of their publisher clients.

Conclusion

Robotic Process Automation is clearly the next frontier in technology-driven business process revolution. It makes businesses smarter, leaner, and more competitive in their respective industries.

Automation Anywhere has combined artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with Robotic Process Automation to create a highly scalable technology that now enjoys a proven track record of helping organisations unlock enormous efficiencies and add significant value to them. The value-addition to businesses is potentially limitless as RPA has demonstrated its ability not just to speed up the organisational processes or reduce errors but also to contribute to the competitive advantage of the businesses in a big way.

To know more about the revolutionary technology that is Robotic Process Automation and learn how it can usher in a phase of rapid growth in productivity and revenues within your organisation, contact AsiaPac by clicking here.